1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus performing data communication with an external terminal device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, since greater importance is placed on documentation, there is a need to develop an image forming apparatus capable of copying an image at a high resolution and with high quality. While this type of image forming apparatus, which originally serves to copy a monochrome image of the scanned document onto the printing paper, has been developed to provide a diversified copy functions such as a color copying function and a zooming function, and also to provide enhanced resolution and quality of the image. Furthermore, there has been a widespread use of a multifunction copier having a plurality of functions as a printer, a facsimile machine, contents service and the like in addition to a copying function.
When employing the above-described type of image forming apparatus, most of them are provided based on the lease contract, in which case a vendor counts the number of times of image formation using a billing counter to charge the usage fee to a customer.
Furthermore, in the image forming apparatus, even if its automatic concentration adjustment function is activated, the image quality varies under the influence of the environment in which the apparatus is placed (temperature, humidity and the like), the state of the supplies (fatigue of the photoreceptor), a change over time, and the like.
The electrophotographic process corresponding to the engine unit of the image forming apparatus has a complicated structure, which makes it difficult for the customer to arbitrarily make adjustments.
Accordingly, in most cases, the customer makes a contract with the vendor for maintenance performed by a customer engineer who periodically visits the place where the image forming apparatus is installed.
However, while the customer engineer (also referred to as a serviceman) performs the maintenance operation, the user's operation is sometimes not allowed since it may hinder the operation of the serviceman.
In this case, if the user can be allowed to use the functions irrelevant to the serviceman's operation, the convenience for the user may be improved.
In this regard, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2007-083682 discloses a method for setting a type of job which is executable in advance before the serviceman starts the maintenance operation, and, when a job request occurs during the maintenance operation, allowing execution of only the job that is set as being executable.
However, not only is the job executed through the operation on the panel of the image forming apparatus, but the job request also occurs by access from the terminal device, for example, a PC (Personal Computer), which is connected through the network to the image forming apparatus.
When the user access through the network by the remote operation causes occurrence of a job request that is unexecutable, this job request may be rejected or discarded.
In this regard, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2006-107293 discloses a method for storing a history of the job executed by the user to notify the user who issued instructions to execute the job that the error condition has been resolved.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2006-107293 as described above discloses that notification is made when the error condition is resolved, which requires the user to start the operation again from the beginning in order to re-execute the job request, thus rendering the operation complicated.
Furthermore, when the job request is not executable, the process cannot be carried out until the maintenance operation is completed, which prevents an immediate action from being taken when the user wishes to immediately execute the job.